2. Google Analytics

It may be an obvious one to the seasoned SEO, but newer students of SEO may not realise this is still the best, free package available. The UI is sometimes confusing to new users due to feature bloat. But once mastered there is no better free tool out there for digging into your data.

Also: Another free alternative that has the benefit of being easy to use is Clicky, which is good to use if you don’t want your data gobbled up by Google.

4. Google Websmaster Tools

It is now called Google Search Console, but a lot of those who have years of experience still call it by it’s original name.

New users sometimes don’t realise the fantastic free, web tools that both offer. Both allow crucial analysis to take place on the health of your website, alongside with important, error alert tools. These tools are essential for any SEO toolbag.

5. Open Site Explorer from Moz.com

SEO toolbars are great for giving you quick, visual information for the website you currently have in your browser. This one from Moz.com is particularly efficient and getting you the important data you need quickly and without fuss.

It has some little extras like a link highlighter which you can set to display “dofollow” links in a different colour to “follow links”.

6. Google trends

Knowing what’s hot and cold with regard to specific keywords can really boost your web traffic. Spot a hot new keyword and you can catch the wave just right. Google trends is an excellent addition to your keyword, toolbox. You should have a trend spotting system in place which allows you to update your content output in real time.

As with all tools in this list it’s free, but it’s also quick, clean and gives you the ability to drill down into the detail of the keyword, with comparisons over time ranges.

Also: buzzsumo.com I love this tool, it gives you limited functionality for free, but even this can give you an edge. Seriously look at going the paid route if you can afford it and you constantly need to be on top of social and who is promoting what content.

7. Similar Web

I enjoy performing competitive analysis, it’s crucial to check how your website is doing compared to its competition.

Similarweb, allows you to access a number of types of data on competitor websites. I find it best use your own website as a control site to give you a fixed, data point. You do need to hand over your mobile number for verification, but it really is worth it. The tool givesyou a ton of info on web traffic, traffic sources, web content etc…

It’s impossible for a tool such as this to be 100% accurate, but this is a very good attempt.

Also: Ahrefs a very user friendly backlink, keyword etc… seo tool. Its free version can give you lots of great data and is worth having.

8. Check your rank for free

Fast, clean and free tool to quickly check where a keyword ranks. To get serious and track 1000’s of keywords, look at a paid for tool, but as a free one this does the job.

You can compare keyword rankings with another sites, geo-target the results…etc.

It wins in simplicity by having nothing to get in the way of your task. Other tools fail because they add too many features and force you to invest time to think what to do next.

When all you want to do is check where a keyword ranks on a specific website.

Also: SEMRush.com, although this is similar to Ahrefs, albeit with a busier user interface. It does have a great keyword ranking tool, which you can access for free. The paid version is also very good.

10. Google mobile speed test

Google has a free, mobile friendly test to check out your websites speed. Part of a great user experience is a fast website, and Google is spending a lot of time and money motivating website owners to make their sites faster and mobile friendly. Back in 2010, Google said the speed of a website would be a factor in web ranking.

For a more in-depth study on website speed and Google rankings, check out the Moz.com article.

Also: seoptimer.com not only checks speed, but a lot of other useful metrics.

11. Robots text generator

A robot .txt file will allow you to tell search bots which page to go to and which to ignore. Usually I create them by hand but sometimes it’s great to have a tool that will do the boring bits for you. The Internet Ninja Tool, from Jim Boykin’s company also allows you to do A/B testing to see how different Robots handle your site.

12 Optimise your images

As we all know website load speed in vital for user experience and ranking in Google. Optimising your images to load as fast as they can is an easy win and WP-Smushit is an excellent tool to crunch your images is using WordPress.

@Vaibhav Aggarwal, I did reference Ahrefs twice in the post, as I do use it and like the interface. It’s very good for comparing websites quickly. I probably could have covered it more, but it’s always a balancing act of trying to keep the post easily digestible and information rich.

But you are totally right to point out that Ahrefs is worthy of such list.

Hi,
Nice list of tools to do free seo analysis of website. Keyword tool helps to get keyword suggestion, analytics for checking daily visitors.
Some paid tools which provide deep analysis are like semrush, majestic, ahrefs, etc.
I’ll suggest you another free tool which provides all important seo data under single report page on – http://zigstat.com
Regards.
Calin

For many websites, there isn’t even a need to pay a lot of money for expensive tools. These free ones are enough to get the ball rolling. Google Analytics and Search Console are absolute musts. It’s data straight from Google!

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